We Are Social presents Social Brands: The eBook

The brands that actively involve their audiences in the creation of value are best placed to succeed in an ever-more connected world. This eBook from We Are Social presents a series of provocations to help you define your brand’s approach to this connected future, and helps you to start bringing that vision to life today, by building a truly social brand.

We Are Social presents Social Brands: The eBook

1.
SOCIAL BRANDS
THE FUTURE OF MARKETING
SIMON KEMP • WE ARE SOCIAL
we
are
social

2.
We Are Social
Introduction
The brands that actively involve their audiences in the
creation of value are best placed to succeed in an ever-
more connected world.
This eBook presents a series of provocations to help
you define your brand’s approach to this connected
future, and helps you to start bringing that vision to
life today, by building a truly social brand.
Social Brands: The Future Of Marketing • @wearesocialsg • 3

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The 8 principles of social brands
1 Social equity drives brand equity
2 Communities have more value than platforms
3 All your marketing must add value
4 Go mobile or stand still
5 Evolve from big ideas to leitmotifs
6 Move from selective hearing to active listening
7 Experiences are the new products
8 CSR must evolve into civic engagement
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We Are Social
An interactive eBook
Wherever you see the icon above, simply click on it to
load a pre-crafted tweet that summarises the key
points on that page. You’ll be able to check and edit
the tweet before you publish it to Twitter.
Words in orange (except for page headlines) are
hyperlinks to more information.
Social Brands: The Future Of Marketing • @wearesocialsg • 5

5.
We Are Social
Download your copy of
the Social Brands eBook:
Social Brands: The Future Of Marketing • @wearesocialsg • 6
DOWNLOAD

6.
We Are Social
PRINCIPLE 1
SOCIAL EQUITY DRIVES BRAND EQUITY
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Starting out right
The key to delivering meaningful returns on marketing
investments (ROMI) is to set clear business objectives
at the outset of marketing activities, and to ensure that
everything the brand does is then focused on
delivering those objectives.
This goes for social media too; if social activities are
not focused on delivering bottom-line benefits for the
brand, they quickly become a dispensable cost.
However, many brands are still stuck in short-term,
cyclical marketing, and objectives are often overly
focused on each quarter’s financial results.
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You can’t hurry love
As a result, marketers often set short-term, sales-
related objectives for social media, instead of
thinking about the longer-term benefits of an
approach that builds meaningful engagement with
audiences over time.
This is partly because relationships take time to
deliver their full potential – often too long to satisfy
the finance department’s quarterly demands.
Consequently, brands often miss the wood for the
trees when it comes to social ROI, abandoning their
efforts before they’ve had a chance to succeed.
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Delivering longer-term value
However, deep audience relationships offer a different
kind of value. Once brands achieve a certain level of
affinity and engagement with an audience, the returns
become more sustainable.
So ‘returns on relationships’ aren’t limited to one-time
results; they’re the marketing gift that keeps giving.
But how do we build these meaningful relationships?
The answer lies in understanding the reasons why
people choose to talk about brands.
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The sociology of choice
Humans are highly social creatures, and it’s
important to remember that people don’t make
choices in isolation.
Our decisions are influenced by our expectations of
other people’s reactions. The more confident we are
that those expectations will be met, the greater our
conviction when making those choices.
As a result, the conversations we have with other
people are one of the most important factors in
determining our brand choices.
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Conversation drives compensation
Humans are inherently social beings, and we like to
share our discoveries and experiences with others.
As a result, brands that inspire favourable
conversations between people are more likely to
achieve higher awareness, interest, and trial.
Brands that can manage these favourable
conversations over time are also more likely to build
enduring loyalty and value.
So, while talk may be cheap, conversations have
tangible brand value.
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The brands that drive the most
favourable conversations are the
brands that will achieve the most
favourable financial outcomes.
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Social marketing vs. social media
It’s the conversations between people that matter
most, though, and these are not necessarily the same
conversations that people have directly with the brand.
Conversations don’t have to start in social media for
them to have value, either.
Everything the brand does – from its packaging to its
advertising, from its customer service to its
recruitment – should be designed to inspire
meaningful, peer-to-peer conversations.
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Products
Customer Service
POS Activity
AdvertisingPackaging
Recruitment
Everything should drive conversation
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Building brands worth talking about
The implications of this are huge; for example, when it
comes to a ‘content’ strategy, we should not start with
the usual suspects such as videos or ‘fill-in-the-blanks’
status updates.
We must stop relying on conversations about content
itself, and use content as a means of fuelling the
conversations that really matter.
This means re-thinking our approach to brand
communications. We need to start by identifying what
we want conversations to be about, and then identify
the most engaging and motivating ways of inspiring
those conversations.
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Stop fuelling conversations
about content, and instead use
content to stimulate and fuel the
conversations that really matter.
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Converting to conversations
That inspiration can come in many forms, and only
a small number of conversation catalysts need to
originate in social media.
Before you make any investments, be very clear
about why the audience might want to be a part of
the conversation.
Be honest with yourself: will anyone actually care?
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Social entities drive social equity
The good news is that getting this right has huge
financial potential; a brand that’s worth talking
about is a brand that people are willing to pay
more for.
In order to take advantage of this potential value,
we must spend more time working out how our
brands can become relevant ‘social entities’.
By building social entities, we in turn build social
equity, and, if managed consistently over time,
this social equity builds financial equity.
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PRINCIPLE 2
BUILD COMMUNITIES, NOT PLATFORMS
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Social is a behaviour, not a channel
Most people visit social networking sites to connect
with others: to stay in touch with friends and family;
to share things with colleagues and peers; and even to
meet strangers with similar interests and needs.
There are times when technology plays an important
part in facilitating these connections; the filters on
Instagram, or the sharing features common to most
social networks, are important parts of the social
networking experience.
However, for most people, social media are just means
to an end, with that ‘end’ being social interaction.
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People before platforms
People connect around the personal, social benefits
these technologies provide, not the functionality itself.
Critically, if those social benefits don’t exist – if the
people we want to connect with are not present, or if
our networks move on – then the platform quickly
loses its value.
We’ve seen this happen many times before; the
declines of Second Life, MySpace, and Friendster were
all driven by the migration of their audiences, not by
technical failures.
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Single-serve audiences
Sadly, when audiences move on from incumbent
platforms – and they invariably do – marketers
quickly lose out.
The investments they’ve made in building a large,
platform-specific audience stop delivering meaningful
returns, because such audiences are invariably ‘non-
transferrable’. How many brands succeeded in
migrating their Second Life audience over to Facebook
without paying for the privilege?
Marketers need to stop buying attention within
specific platforms, and find a more enduring way of
managing social media engagement.
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From platforms to communities
We need to stop thinking of social media as media,
and instead focus on the motivations and behaviours
that drive people’s social activities in the first place.
Instead of buying attention in the biggest platforms of
the day, the successful brands of the future will spend
time understanding how to deliver value to audiences
across different settings and contexts.
They will nurture active communities that choose to
engage with and around the brand and its activities
wherever and whenever they can. They will use new
platforms to offer incremental value, and not simply to
interrupt people in new ways.
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Use new technology to
add new value – not just to
interrupt people in new ways.
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Common utility for communities
The secret to building ‘migratory’ communities is to
understand people’s wants, needs and desires, and to
build relevant and engaging connections around them
at every opportunity.
We need to understand what brings communities
together, and build our strategies around their shared
interests and passions – not around technical
functionality or platforms.
We need to move from eyeballs to heartstrings.
Above all, we need to add value to our audiences’ lives
at every opportunity.
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PRINCIPLE 3
ALL YOUR MARKETING MUST ADD VALUE
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The brand proposal
Too much of today’s marketing relies on elaborate
spectacle to divert people’s attention.
Brands still rely too heavily on interrupting people
with increasingly shiny distractions, placing their
emphasis on short-term gains instead of longer-term,
mutual value.
The result is ‘one-night-stand marketing’:
transactional relationships based on pick-up lines and
instant gratification, at the expense of more
meaningful, enduring relationships.
However, this approach is unsustainable. We need to
think about getting engaged.
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Shouting for attention rarely
wins people’s hearts. There’s a
very big difference between
“I’m aware” and “I care”.
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From interruption to interaction
The secret to better marketing is not about finding
more efficient ways to interrupt people. Rather, it’s
about finding new ways to engage people as
effectively as possible.
The secret to this engagement lies in understanding
what people want, and in adding value at every
possible opportunity; offering people things that
make their lives better, and adding to their
experiences instead of interrupting them.
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Very soon, marketing
that doesn’t add value
will simply be ignored.
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From ads to added value
This shift from interruption to added-value interaction
will impact media too.
Publishers will need to evolve from ad-funded models
that distract people from their core product (i.e. their
content), and adapt their business model to an
approach that delivers more integral value.
It’s this shift to an audience-centric model – rather
than today’s brand-oriented, media-centric model –
that will have the greatest impact on marketing. If we
are to succeed in this future, we need to put our
audiences’ needs, wants, desires first.
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Engage people
around their passions,
not your products.
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PRINCIPLE 4
GO MOBILE OR STAND STILL
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Mobile phones are everywhere
Google tells us that more people around the world now
own a mobile phone than a toothbrush, while the UN
tells us that more people have access to mobile phones
than toilets.
However, despite the mobile phone’s ubiquity, a
recent study revealed that just four in ten brand
advertisers in APAC consider mobile to be ‘very
important’ to their current marketing, while a scant
three in ten actually have a mobile strategy at all.
So why aren’t marketers’ plans more in tune with their
audience’s existing behaviour?
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The world’s favourite medium
Although it’s difficult to measure these things
accurately, data suggest that more people around the
world now subscribe to a mobile phone plan than have
access to TV.
In other words, it’s highly likely that, around the
world, more people now use mobile phones than
watch TV. That’s a huge shift.
Moreover, according to Ericsson, global mobile sign-
ups are still growing at a rate of more than 100 million
new subscriptions every quarter.
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Mobiles are on the move
Many people around the world still rely on relatively
basic ‘feature’ phones rather than smartphones, but
even these more basic handsets provide a level of
intimacy that TV can’t match.
What’s more, the shift to internet-connected
smartphone devices continues to accelerate, and
Ericsson reports that global mobile data usage is
currently increasing at close to 15% per quarter.
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Out of sync
Perhaps more tellingly, people are increasingly
emotionally connected to their phones too.
70% of people in China say that they “can’t live
without” a mobile phone.
People used to say the same of TV, but ironically,
many people now download ‘TV’ content to watch on
their mobile phones whenever they choose, without
the adverts.
This isn’t about replacing one medium with another,
though; TV still has a vital role to play in the mix.
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Investments to go
Mobile has a big part to play in the evolution of TV, by
enabling and promoting phenomena such as second-
screen interaction and trans-media storytelling.
But in a world where mobile devices help us reach
more of our consumers, more of the time, in more
contextually relevant ways than television, we must
invest more of our time and budgets into exploring
how mobile can help us achieve our objectives.
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If it’s not mobile, it’s not going anywhere
Mobile offers a very different kind of audience
experience to TV. The latter is still largely a
communal device; a centrepiece that takes pride of
place in our living rooms.
However, mobile is more personal; its primary
purpose has always been to connect us with other
people, rather than to deliver passive entertainment.
Critically, people have more control over their
phones. They alone decide which activities they
participate in, what content they consume, and where
and when they do so.
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Mobile activities by time spent
• Source: supermonitoring.com. Figures represent share of time spent on Android and iOS devices Social Brands: The Future Of Marketing • @wearesocialsg • 42
32%
Games
24%
Social
media
18%
Web
browsing
8%
Entertainment
8%
Utilities

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My precious
Because of their size and flexibility, mobiles have also
become many people’s most important devices,
following us to the boardroom, to the bedroom, and
even to the bathroom.
Surveys have found that one in three American
smartphone owners would rather give up sex than give
up their phones, although 20% of young Americans
also admit to having used their phone during sex.
Perhaps because of this device intimacy, however,
people don’t welcome interruptions on their phones.
As a result, interruptive broadcast approaches are
definitely not the best use of the medium.
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1 in 3 smartphone owners
would rather give up sex
than give up their phone.
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The importance of smartphones
• Sources: extrapolated from Google’s “Our Mobile Life” and US Census Bureau data Social Brands: The Future Of Marketing • @wearesocialsg • 46
55%
“I’d give up TV before
my smartphone’
46%
“I’d give up my computer
before my smartphone”
81%
“I won’t leave the house
without my smartphone”

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Social by design
Mobile phones started life as a truly ‘social medium’;
they were always intended to be a means of
connecting people.
However, as they’ve evolved from voice-and-text
handsets into today’s multi-purpose connected
devices, the scope of social interaction that they
offer has increased dramatically, to the extent that
telephony now only accounts for a fraction of our
mobile activities.
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Social to go
The importance of mobile social networking continues
to grow. Mobile now accounts for two thirds of the
time we spend on social networking activities, and
more than 1 billion people accessed Facebook from
mobile devices in March 2014.
Meanwhile, as we saw in our recent research into
social, digital and mobile activities around the world,
chat apps are driving mobile’s share of our social
activities even higher. Platforms like WhatsApp,
WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk all have hundreds of
millions of active users, and host tens of billions of
social interactions each day.
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Marketing implications
Mobile doesn’t just offer new opportunities to drive
attention and engagement though; it is increasingly
becoming a key channel for conversion too.
Here again, the role of mobile social media comes to
the fore, with around half of Facebook’s users in the
UK checking the site while in physical stores.
Within the next few years, marketing strategies that
don’t come to life on mobile devices will never come
to life at all.
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In the future, strategies that
don’t come to life on mobile
will never come to life at all.
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Connecting
So how do marketers make better use of mobile? The
answer doesn’t need to be about building apps.
Rather, we need to invest time and effort in
understanding the ways in which people are using
mobile.
Where and when are they using their devices?
What are the wants, needs and desires driving their
behaviour?
What role can the brand play in helping them achieve
their goals?
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Better mobile marketing
1 Deliver value: utility, entertainment, or social interaction.
2 Harness mobile context: tailor experiences to the
different situations in which people engage.
3 Streamline the experience: adapt content for a range of
different devices and connection speeds.
4 Make it portable: enable people to continue their
experience across devices, especially when sharing things.
5 Offer varying depths of immersion: e.g. for people with
a 30-second work break, or with a 30-minute commute.
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Socially mobile
Take advantage of the fact that most people use their
mobile devices in some kind of social context, whether
they’re in the company of others, or simply connected
via social media.
People’s social media activities will increasingly come
to life on the go, so marketers must integrate mobile
and social seamlessly in order to provide the best
possible experiences, wherever and whenever the
audience chooses to engage.
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PRINCIPLE 5
THE RISE OF THE COMMS LEITMOTIF
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Rethinking the model
For the past few decades, marketing has been
dominated by a mass-media paradigm.
During that time, we’ve defined the ‘best’ marketing as
that which makes the most efficient use of broadcast
media, and as a result, we’ve spent decades perfecting
an approach that’s all about reducing the cost of
interrupting people.
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From eﬃciency to eﬀectiveness
The result is communications that have been distilled
down to their lowest common denominator: a
selection of sound bites designed to be shared as
succinctly as possible across a range of media,
repeated again and again in the hopes of eliciting a
Pavlovian response that will deliver optimum scores in
campaign research tracking.
But this paradigm is broken; we’ve become obsessed
with media efficiency, and as a result, we’ve lost sight
of what effective communications look like.
Note: effectiveness is doing the right thing; efficiency
is doing that thing right.
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Back to basics
A quick look at definitions reveals our fundamental
error. The English word ‘communication’ evolved from
‘communicare’, a Latin verb meaning ‘to share’.
At its heart, therefore, communication is about
creating a shared understanding. It isn’t about what
you say; it’s about what other people understand.
However, as part of our relentless drive to maximise
media efficiency, we’ve become overly fixated on ‘the
message’ (i.e. what we want to say), and we’re failing
to build a common understanding of what our brands
and their offerings stand for.
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Communication isn’t
about what you say; it’s about
what other people understand.
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Brands as social entities
Before we can build a shared understanding with our
audiences, we need to gain greater clarity of those
audiences’ motivations, and the dynamics that shape
our exchanges with them.
However, in order for brands to achieve their full
potential, they also need to integrate more actively
into the social dynamics that define the world in which
they come to life.
Sadly, most brands are more interested in themselves
than they are in the audiences they intend to serve.
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Most brands behave like
new-born children: entirely
egocentric, and oblivious to
the needs of others.
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Brand appeal
However, studies have found that the traits we find
most appealing in other people are those that are
socially oriented:
! Be natural
! Be considerate
! Be generous
! Be true
! Be social
For a brand to function as a meaningful social entity, it
must embody these traits too, so we’ll explore each of
them in detail over the coming pages.
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Be natural
Popularity is more pull than push, and trying to
become popular through hollow flattery and false
mirroring is unsustainable. Impressing people is much
easier if you lead by example instead of screaming for
attention. As a result, it’s far better to champion the
cause than it is to ride the bandwagon.
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Be considerate
People appreciate a good listener, so don’t talk about
yourself all the time. Take time to hear what your
audience wants to say to you, and not just to work out
what you want to say to them. Embrace everyday
people as well as celebrities and influencers.
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Be generous
In order to build trust, give before you take. What
does your audience want, need and desire? How can
you help them achieve it through your
communications alone?
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Be true
Stay true to your ideals, but don’t force them upon
other people. Confidence, honesty, humility and
kindness are far more meaningful and enduring
brand values than ‘dynamic’ or ‘cool’.
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Be social
Conversations are as much about social discourse as
they are about the sharing of information. Avoid an
over-reliance on monologue and one-line statements.
Use dialogue to reinforce bonds as well as to establish
new relationships. Treat others as you’d hope to be
treated yourself, and always be ready with the
proverbial olive branch.
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Becoming socially engaged
For brands, the last principle – Be Social – is perhaps
the most important when it comes to building
enduring success.
Of course, as a ‘Conversation Agency’, we’re biased in
this regard, but We Are Social’s positioning isn’t an
accident; we strongly believe that there’s far more
value in dialogue than there is in the broadcast
paradigm of a repetitive monologue.
So how do brands ‘grow up’ and evolve from their
current communications infancy to become more
socially engaged entities?
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The art of conversation
It’s important to assert here that you can’t ‘win’ a
conversation. Conversations are about a mutual
exchange of value; if you’re trying to win, that’s most
likely called an argument.
Beyond the sharing of information and knowledge, a
big part of the mutual exchange of value in a
conversation is the opportunity to deepen bonds and
strengthen relationships.
But this is an area where many marketers fall down: in
our arrogance, we believe that we have more to teach
our audiences than we might learn from those
audiences in return.
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Stop talking about yourself
To this point, let’s borrow a section from a Wikihow
post entitled “How To Stop Talking About Yourself”:
“Respond to questions without turning the focus
onto you. When asked, “Did you see Survivor last
night?”, avoid an answer like: “Yes! I never miss an
episode; in fact my husband and I watched
Survivor, Idol, and Dancing with the Stars. Did you
see how well Kristen danced last night?”
You answered the question, but redirected the focus
onto you. Instead, try something like: “I missed it;
was it good?” Simply answer the question they
asked you, and give them a chance to talk with you.”
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The true spirit of conversation consists
more in bringing out the cleverness of others
than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he
who goes away pleased with himself and his
own wit is also greatly pleased with you.
~JeandeLaBrùyere
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“

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Actively involving people
Making people feel like they’re an important part of
your brand’s world, and welcoming them into your
communications, both have huge opportunities.
For most brands, it’s still financially infeasible to have
one-to-one conversations with each individual
member of their audience, but channels like social
media make these interactions much easier than they
were in a broadcast-only world.
However, harnessing ‘conversational’ channels
involves a very different approach to the ‘lowest-
common-denominator’ communications most
marketers have become used to.
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Change is coming
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the ‘matching
luggage’ approach associated with Big Advertising
Ideas is not as relevant to social communications as it
is to broadcast media like TV.
A single-minded communications approach may be a
great way to drive media efficiency, but it only works
effectively if we get it right first time.
More importantly, most people’s brains work in
slightly different ways, so the search for an all-
powerful Big Idea is often as futile as the quest for the
Holy Grail.
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Single-minded vs. small-minded
One of the reasons why this approach is rarely the best
option is because lowest-common-denominator
messaging rarely delivers the highest possible
engagement or audience value.
The challenge is that single-minded communications
are only designed to convey that single message, and
that’s only efficient if conveying that single message
will successfully establish the total desired
understanding across the whole audience.
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Meaning is what matters
In order to maximise effectiveness, therefore, we may
need to convey our ‘message’ in a variety of different
ways over time, and to different groups of people,
before we can establish a sufficient level of shared
understanding across the whole audience.
That was rarely an option in an expensive, TV-
dominated world, but our media mix options have
evolved, and we have new opportunities.
It’s time to rethink our commandments.
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Enter the leitmotif
In musical theory, a leitmotif is:
“a musical term referring to a short, constantly
recurring musical phrase, associated with a
particular person, place, or idea… In particular, [it]
should be clearly identified so as to retain its identity
if modified on subsequent appearances, [but] it is
transformable and recurs in different guises
throughout the piece in which it occurs.” [ source ]
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Riﬃng on a theme
If that all sounds a bit complex, this Star Wars
explanation nails the concept beautifully:
“Each important idea [and character] in Star Wars
has its own leitmotif. At the beginning of A New
Hope, Luke watches the suns set, wondering what his
destiny in the world could be. His leitmotif [or ‘Luke’s
Theme’, if you will], is played wistfully and slowly to
reinforce this idea. Later, when he is in the midst of
rescuing Leia, his theme is stronger, more percussive,
and rhythmic. Essentially, the same notes are being
played, but the style with which they are played
makes all the difference in the tone of the
scene.” [ source ]
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Don’t just repeat
Critically, a leitmotif isn’t the same as the constant
repetition of music like techno, nor that of frequency-
driven broadcast advertising.
Rather, it’s about a theme that changes and evolves
over time, adding new value or meaning with each
evolution. As a result, a ‘communications leitmotif’
may offer a route to more effective marketing.
Rather than relying on the constant repetition of a
single message, marketers can adopt a broader, richer
communications ‘agenda’, using a variety of activities
to engage more of their audiences in more meaningful
ways over time, thus ensuring a greater chance of
success.
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The dandelion approach
As Cory Doctorow asserted in a seminal blog post a
few years back, the dandelion doesn’t put all its eggs
(or seeds) in one basket. Rather than investing all its
efforts in nurturing a single offspring, the dandelion
spreads as many seeds as possible in the hope that at
least some will fall on fertile ground. This is not about
random dissemination though; despite slight
variations in each seed, every one contains the DNA of
its parent plants, and each one is designed to travel as
far as possible. Critically, the ‘costs’ associated with
producing each seed are low enough that individual
failures are not an issue.
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The tapas approach
Meals comprising many small, shared dishes are
popular all over the world, from Tapas in Spain to Dim
Sum in the Orient. Each individual dish can be quite
different, but each combines to deliver an overall meal
‘experience’ that is both reliable and enjoyable, even if
each individual dish doesn’t meet everyone’s tastes.
This approach can work well for communications too:
by harnessing a variety of smaller activities in different
channels, brands have a greater chance of delivering
something that resonates with each member of the
audience to establish a common understanding.
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The kaizen approach
Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning “change for the
better”, and is a central part of a continuous
improvement approach. The same concept lies at the
heart of effective conversations too: each time a
participant in the discussion shares new insights or
information, the other participants can refine or
modify their opinions or approach, in order to reach
an optimum, collective understanding. The Kaizen
approach is a bit more direct than the previous two,
but it has a clear role to play in a variety of brand
situations, particularly where the topic is more
complex, or where rational motivations dominate.
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Listen and learn
There will be many more ways to bring such an
‘evolving theme’ approach to life, but the approaches
that win through will be those that deliver a new kind
of efficiency: the ability to identify when the desired
understanding has been shared with the audience,
and when investments can move to a new
communications task.
In order to achieve this efficiency, however,
marketers will need to get much better at listening to
– and measuring – audience response and reaction,
and using these inputs to refine their
communications approach.
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PRINCIPLE 6FROM SELECTIVE HEARING TO ACTIVE LISTENING
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Listening vs. asking
As we saw in Chapter 3, marketing is all about creating
mutually beneficial exchanges of value. The nature of
that value exchange will vary between brands and
audiences and over time, but in order for marketers to
deliver maximum value to their brands, it holds that
they need to understand what that value looks like to
their audiences.
This isn’t just a case of asking people what they want,
though; as Steve Jobs astutely pointed out,
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups.
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want
until you show it to them.”
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Marketers need to be people watchers
If you want to deliver real value to people, you need to
understand them as people: their behaviour, their
attitudes and beliefs, their motivations… In short, you
need to understand their lives.
Conventional marketing research is great at finding
specific answers to specific questions, but the real
magic for marketers lies in modern-day
anthropology – not the 19th Century ‘home-stay in
Borneo’ variety, but a fresh, always-on digital
approach to meaningful people-watching.
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If they are to add real value,
brands need to understand
people’s lives, not just their
demographic profiles.
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Social media listening
Every day, hundreds of millions of people around the
world share valuable insights about themselves via
publicly accessible social media.
Not all of these posts mention brands, but that doesn’t
mean they’re not of value to marketers. Indeed, almost
all public posts can help inquisitive marketers to build
a richer understanding of their audiences that they
couldn’t obtain elsewhere.
Even those ubiquitous ‘photos of my lunch’ can reveal
powerful insights into an audience’s worldview: do
they opt for expensive restaurants? Do they look for
healthy alternatives? Do they mention brand names,
or stick to generic topics?
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It’s there if you listen
When we explore people’s social media activities with
an open mind, we’re almost certain to find something
of value.
However, almost all marketers miss this value,
because they’re too busy ‘listening’ for explicit
mentions of brand names or campaign hashtags.
As a result, we’re leaving far too many rich insights
uncovered in the feed.
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From big data to big insights
One reason why we’re missing this value is that
marketers are too often caught up in the demands of a
quarterly sales cycle, and the ‘quick wins’ that offer the
easiest way to achieve short-term targets often come at
the cost of bigger, longer-term opportunities.
This focus on ‘delivering the numbers’ means
marketers spend too much time looking for ways to
barge into audiences’ lives and conversations.
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Become a better conversationalist
We spend too much time looking for ways to interrupt
people. But it doesn’t need to be that way.
Indeed, this interruptive approach – even though it’s
become ‘industry standard’ – contravenes one of the
most important rules of communication: when you’re
talking with someone, actively listen to what they’re
saying, and don’t simply wait for your turn to speak.
Sadly, too many brands don’t even wait for their turn
to speak though; they’ve become far too used to
interrupting people whenever they have sufficient
budget.
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Get to know your audiences
Even amongst those brands that do listen, most only
do so on an ad-hoc basis, usually by paying a research
agency to ask a series of brand-oriented questions. The
danger with this approach is that marketers only pay
attention to a summary of aggregated findings, and
miss the motivations and context behind people’s
statements and behaviour.
In order to become more successful, marketers need to
move beyond ‘brand egocentrism’, and start to think of
their activities in the context of people’s lives.
We need to spend more time actively getting to know
our audiences, by being personally involved in the
listening process.
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Social listening vs. social monitoring
Fortunately, rich insights are readily available to
marketers with the willingness to listen.
By paying attention to the statements and
conversations that people share in public social media,
we can gain a far deeper understanding of what people
actually want, need and desire.
We don’t need to collect everything in one go, either;
by spending just 5 minutes a day actively listening to
the conversations of a subset of your audience, you’ll
quickly gain an affinity for the things they care about.
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Social value beyond social media
More importantly, these insights can add value well
beyond your social media activities; most people (i.e.
non-marketers) use social media to talk about a wide
variety of things they do in their everyday lives, so
proactive listening can inform every aspect of your
brand’s value proposition: advertising, packaging, CSR
opportunities, in-store activities, and even R&D.
In order to do this effectively, though, we need to
move beyond ‘ego monitoring’. Instead of listening
only to what people are saying about your brand, use
more generic keyword terms in your searches.
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People buy beneﬁts
For example, if you’re a shampoo brand, don’t just
listen out for mentions of Pantene, Dove and Head &
Shoulders; ultimately, people don’t pay for shampoo,
they pay for beautiful hair, so listen out for the broader
conversations they’re having about hair.
By adopting this broader approach, you’ll quickly gain
insights into people’s problems and motivations, their
preferences, and their needs.
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Social listening can add value everywhere
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Customer Service
POS Activity
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Join the conversation
Furthermore, by moving beyond the simplistic
measurement of ego metrics like share of voice or
campaign engagement, you’ll start to find
opportunities to join larger, organic audience
conversations where your brand can actually add real
value, without needing to interrupt people.
The real opportunity for social media listening is to
identify ways brands can use communications to add
real value to people’s lives, and become welcome
participants in more meaningful conversations.
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Getting started
The first step towards uncovering these rich insights is
to identify who you want to listen to.
Don’t restrict this definition to your ‘consumers’
though; listening to broader audiences such as
influencers, advocates, detractors, NGOs and
regulators can add rich and unexpected insights too.
Once you’ve defined your audience, you’ll need to find
where they are in public social media. You don’t need
to find everyone in your audience though, and you
certainly don’t need to analyse every one of their posts.
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Schedule your listening
A great way to start is to find a few dozen people
talking about something generic (but brand-relevant)
on Twitter, and then read through some of their other
recent posts. Inevitably this will include some photos
of their lunch, but you’ll start to get an affinity for who
they are as real people.
Once you do this a few times, you’ll probably want to
adopt a more systematic approach. Start by putting
together a simple list of keywords to search for, and
make a regular ‘appointment’ to listen to the people
who’re talking about those terms.
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Always-on listening
Select a few people from these conversations at
random, and take some time to listen to what they’re
saying about other things too; this way, you’ll quickly
build a more intuitive understanding of your audience
that goes well beyond demographics.
Using social listening tools can help make your
anthropological efforts more effective too; harness the
power of always-on listening tools like Tweetdeck and
HootSuite, as well as powerful aggregators such as
Sysomos and Radian6, to keep an ear open throughout
the day and identify opportunities to join other
people’s conversations.
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Try it for yourself
There are a number of great, free listening tools out
there too, so don’t let budgets stop you – we regularly
use socialmention, addictomatic and twazzup, and
great new tools launch all the time.
You’ll still need to analyse conversations of course; the
tools can’t do everything on their own. However, once
you have your tools set up, you’ll only need to listen for
a few minutes every day before you start to identify
new ways to add value to your audiences’ lives and to
your brand’s bottom line.
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PRINCIPLE 7
EXPERIENCES ARE THE NEW PRODUCTS
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The diﬀerence between buying and selling
When people buy brands, they’re usually paying for
something more than a core product or service. For
example, they don’t pay for the liquid inside a
shampoo bottle; they pay for beautiful hair, and for the
confidence which that brings.
The most successful brands understand that broader,
benefit-led marketing allows them to extend their
impact beyond core products and services to deliver
‘augmented’ offerings that create far greater value to
both them and their audiences.
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People only really pay for
benefits; products and services
are just means to an end.
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Something for everyone
This approach applies to brands across categories:
! Nike uses participative events like We Run as core revenue
streams, not just advertising.
! The iTunes Store moves Apple from a technology manufacturer
to a broad lifestyle brand.
! Madonna earns more from concerts and merchandise than she
does from albums.
! Red Bull has repositioned itself as a ‘media and experiences
company’, extending the brand well beyond energy drinks.
! American Express uses activities like OPEN forum and Small
Business Saturday to extend beyond payment services and
become an overall ‘partner in success’ for its merchants.
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Experiences add more value than products
It’s clear to see why this approach works: augmented
experiences offer people something more than a mere
means to an end, and as a result, they succeed in
delivering a differentiated value proposition that
people are willing to pay more for.
Moreover, these experiences are inherently more
‘social’ than simple products and services too – it’s
easier for people to share an experience than it is for
them to share most products.
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Something to talk about
There are also more compelling reasons for people
to talk about great experiences than there are to
recommend products. As a result, augmented
experiences can inspire activity that extends beyond
the reach of customer reviews or the brand’s own
social media posts.
So, when it comes to your brand’s social media, don’t
just think about how you’ll drive greater engagement
with your own social media posts; use augmented
experiences to inspire organic audience conversations.
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The social marketer’s mission
is to create brands that are
always worth talking about.
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PRINCIPLE 8
CSR EVOLVES INTO CIVIC MARKETING
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Beyond philanthropy
Society increasingly expects brands to give back at
least as much as they take. As a result, CSR is moving
higher up the executive agenda.
However, many companies still think of CSR in terms
of corporate philanthropy.
While this approach is more constructive than the
guilt-avoidance that characterised CSR in the 1980s, it
misses a much bigger opportunity.
Brands that get CSR right don’t think of it as an
obligation; they see it as an opportunity to build
mutual value for the brands and its communities.
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Civic brands
Many of the world’s best-loved brands started out with
a civic agenda at their heart. A great example
is Cadbury, who went beyond offering world-leading
working conditions to build an entire community
around its Bourneville factory:
“In 1893, George Cadbury bought 120 acres of land
close to [the Bourneville factory] and planned, at his
own expense, a model village which would ‘alleviate
the evils of modern more cramped living conditions’.
By 1900, the estate included 314 cottages and houses
set on 330 acres.” [ source ]
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Ethical business
Modern-day civic-minded brands have extended this
sense of community beyond their own workers, and
brands like TOMS are defining compelling new
standards of ethical business.
By putting CSR at the heart of the brand’s proposition,
TOMS has created a truly remarkable brand, inspiring
so much admiration and interest that people feel
compelled to share its story for themselves.
This brand purpose has also allowed TOMS to extend
its offerings beyond shoes, and the brand now uses
eyewear and coffee to deliver ‘one-for-one’ benefits.
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Make a bigger diﬀerence
Brands are also increasingly using CSR as a
cornerstone of their marketing. American
Express’s Small Business Saturday initiative has
redefined the ambitions of marketers everywhere,
driving billions of dollars in sales for small businesses,
and delivering a huge boost to AmEx’s revenues in the
process.
Effective CSR doesn’t have to be large-scale to add
community value though; brands like Ben & Jerry’s
and Oreo have incorporated civic-minded messaging
in their marketing too, taking a public stance on issues
that they believe in, and supporting communities that
they care about.
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Endorsement that money couldn’t buy
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Taking a stand helps build a brand
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A happy compromise
Most people still recognise that these activities as
marketing, but when the alternative is interruptive
advertising that’s trying to sell things people neither
want nor need, it’s easy to understand why
community-minded marketing gets more positive
feedback across different audiences.
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Making things people
want is more effective than
making people want things.
~JohnWillshire
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Giving and growing
Brands can also use community programs as part of
their market development activities. A great example
is Nike’s ‘Reuse-a-Shoe’ programme, where the brand
recycles old sneakers to create pitch surfaces for inner-
city sports grounds.
Communities benefit through access to state-of-the-art
sports facilities where they can exercise and train for
free, while Nike benefits by getting people more
actively involved in sports, thereby increasing
potential sales and offering the chance to identify star
athletes of the future.
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CSR should be win-win
This ‘mutual benefit’ approach is the key to sustainable
CSR success, and offers the greatest potential rewards.
The obvious goodwill benefits that these activities
generate mean civic-minded brands are more likely to
be welcomed into people’s daily lives.
Beyond straightforward preference drivers, CSR can be
a powerful part of a brand’s social media activities too.
At the most basic level, CSR initiatives offer brands a
meaningful way to engage their audiences in
conversation.
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Add value through your values
More importantly, though, audiences are far more
likely to share their own stories about brands that
make a real difference to people’s lives, and this
sharing can result in powerful, organic conversations
across social media and beyond.
So, instead of an approach that requires brands to
reach into their coffers to relieve the corporate
conscience, brands need to start thinking of CSR in
terms of opportunities to add tangible value to a
variety of stakeholders.
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The brands that will succeed in
the future won’t just give back
to communities; they’ll actively
build and nurture communities.
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NEXT STEPS
BRINGING YOUR PLANS TO LIFE
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From theory to action
You’ll only succeed if you put your plans into action.
The sooner you start testing your hypotheses, the
sooner you’ll know what works and what doesn’t, and
the greater your chances of getting to the future first.
So go do.
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Share this eBook with your friends:
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About the author
Simon Kemp is a marketing strategist and practitioner
with a particular enthusiasm for all things social,
digital, and mobile. He is We Are Social’s Regional
Managing Partner in Asia, where he helps clients to
listen to, understand, and engage in valuable
conversations throughout social media.
You’ll find Simon across the social web as @eskimon:
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About We Are Social
We Are Social is a global conversation agency. We
help brands to listen to, understand, and engage in
conversations throughout social media.
Our team brings together 500 social media enthusiasts
across 9 offices on 5 continents.
We’re already helping many of the world’s top brands,
including Unilever, Adidas, Intel, Red Bull, Diageo,
Lenovo, Heinz, and Louis Vuitton.
Learn more about our work and how we can help you:
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About this eBook
You have permission to print, post and share this
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provided you make no changes or edits to its contents
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Please note that the right to sell this document, or any
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